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Fitness and women’s health: what does it take for a woman to feel safe and secure?

So many articles talk about fitness. How important it is to our well-being. To our overall mental, physical and even spiritual health.

When you dive into it, there are sometimes obstacles to women becoming more fit. For example, in the martial arts, women face a lack of female role models as instructors, environments where they don’t have a private or separate changing room, and occasionally the predatory aspect of a sexual advance from a teacher or student in an environment where they may already be feeling outside of their comfort zone. While none of these obstacles is insurmountable, the combination can feel weighty. Difficult. And on those nights when we don’t have motivation, or for those women who aren’t sure they are ready, these challenges can be the end of it.

I want to discuss something more fundamental, though. Something beyond motivation, or specific situations at a gym or martial arts studio. I want to talk about personal safety. I was chatting with a colleague yesterday, a kind and intelligent woman. I knew she was working out each morning and was so happy with it. I always saw her as a role model for my own personal fitness goals. But when I saw her yesterday she seemed tired and frustrated. I asked her how the workouts were going.

There was a change at her gym and she could no longer get there at the right time to be able to enter and exit during daylight hours. She times her schedule (work, two kids, other family obligations) such that she never exits her car at home at night because walking from her car to the door isn’t always safe. She tried to get the gym owner to adjust the hours. But they live in a rural area and that wasn’t possible. She was maybe going to get her own key or code, because the gym owner wished to be accommodating. But there was a nervousness about this.

We live in a world where women are always prey. It doesn’t matter how confident we are, how much we train, or what our personal attitude is. No matter what we do as individual women, we are sustaining our lives inside a dangerous system where predators are everywhere. If we look at it too closely, we would never even leave the house at all.

When we go to the grocery for milk at night. When we face down a guy at the gas station who may be friendly, or may be about to abduct us. When we see our sisters, mothers, and friends faces in missing person ads, in newspaper columns about domestic violence, or in the uneasy story of a maintenance man who comes in with his own key and doesn’t knock – is he safe? Can we relax?

What will it take for women to feel safe and secure? For certain, it is a problem beyond any one woman’s ability to solve. To place the onus of the solution on personal action or responsibility is to deny a true and real change. Because it will take every one of us to shift this. To make this world safer. To truly offer fitness and martial arts as a way to better health, we must address women’s safety and remove the “prey” stamp off of each woman’s forehead.

Take heart. It’s daunting, yet in clearing away the illusions we cut to the source of the problem and can begin to solve it. In the words of Neil Young, “Don’t let it bring you down. It’s only castles burning. Find someone who’s turning, and you will come around.”

Together I do believe that we can do this. Who around you can you find – someone who is turning – making this better? Could you be this person? Can I?

To simply be in a conversation where you listen and make a gesture of connection. Or offer a friendly pat on the back. A text saying “After everything you have overcome, you can surely handle this.” An invitation to join in. A ride to the gym for a woman who might be scared to go alone. A place where women can change clothes privately, knowing that many of us have experienced sexual assault and must overcome that fear to train. Learning to read a woman’s level of comfort and resolving to not push her any faster than she is willing to go.

A commitment to seeing women not as prey and instead as allies, friends and sisters.